A gift that took five hours and could not be bought

The aftermath of the flood was made far more bearable by the people who helped us recover the contents and the building. One man went well beyond what anyone could have asked.

We spent a long time on what we could possibly give him that would convey it. We settled on something that could not be bought as a unit: a British newspaper from the day he was born, two Manchester United matchday programmes from the year he was born, and a written message, framed to be hung.

Perhaps five hours of thinking, finding, and building. And something he is unlikely to come across in deepest, darkest Vermont.

This isn't a note about the gift. It's about what the gift licensed.

Handing it over gave us a reason to tell him a story: why we thought he'd like it and what we'd had to go and find. That gave us a reason to tell him what we actually thought of him as a person, in front of his wife and 13 year old daughter, which, we hope landed as we deeply intended.

Some of that could have happened with a bought gift. But the heavy lifting would have been done by an algorithm, a credit card and a delivery van, and I suspect the whole thing would have been thinner, and shorter-lived.